Speaker
Mr
Leif Oppermann
(University of Nottingham)
Description
Pervasive Games are a new type of game that takes place outside in the wild and
makes sense of the user's context, often based on her position. Mobile phones are
the perfect ubiquitous device for this type of game but usually come without a
GPS device which could be used for positioning. Operator based positioning can
deliver a GPS-compatible coordinate in latitude and longitude (WGS84), but this
involves a fee for every position look-up and is only available on a few
networks. Client based positioning based on the GSM network's cell IDs is an
alternative solution, where the phone's current serving cell is utilized to
infer the user's location either in an abstract graph space or in WGS84
coordinates by using look-up tables of previously seen and geocoded cell IDs.
This talk covers how Python for Nokia Series 60 phones has helped us to collect
the data for the client based positioning approach and how we use it to prepare
for a location-based multiplayer game accross the 3 cities of Nottingham, Derby
and Leicester which will go online on Valentines Day 2007. The game is going to
run on a number of mobile phones. We are using Python for rapid prototyping of
required tools and potentially also the gaming interface.
Parts of the software could potentially be made available to the community.
Parts of the software have been developed within a 6th Framework EU funded
integrated project on pervasive gaming (IPerG) in which the author and his
affiliation participate.
Links:
http://www.pervasive-gaming.org/
http://makinglovecity.blogspot.com/
http://www.lovecity.tv/
Author
Mr
Leif Oppermann
(University of Nottingham)
